Maya Mikdashi

Jeanette Feghali, known to millions across the world as Sabah, died last week at the age of 87. By the time of her death, she had been a star for almost seven decades.
Sabah began her career while still a teenager, moving from Lebanon to Cairo during the 1940s, the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Her image and voice are stored in more than eighty films, and by the time of her death she had recorded over three thousand songs written by generations of the region’s best ...

Bassem Chit died last week. He was thirty four years old. His heart attacked him while he was in his apartment. He died alone.
Perhaps the important thing to dwell on is that he did not live a lonely life. Or at least, he made the world a less lonely place. For sure, he made being political in Lebanon a less lonely, less hopeless and less alienating way of being. This is no small feat in context where “being political” is most often equated with being partisan to one or ...

From Beirut, the picture looks grim. Syria, Palestine, Iraq—all angry reds and blistering oranges. Here, we have the sea . . . the sea. Blues to drown ourselves in, greens and yellows to traffic us to another same day.
The ground swells, my fingers sweat. The center will hold, must hold. No sudden movements, no jagged breaths—enjoy the slack tightness of this rope. Anxiety, anticipation—it is coming—a tomorrow that will bring us closer to everything we already know. ...

Every morning we wake up to an updated butcher’s bill: one hundred, two hundred, four hundred, six hundred Palestinians killed by Israel’s war apparatus as of this writing. These numbers gloss over many details: the majority of Gazans, one of the most populated and impoverished areas in the world, are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine. It is under a brutal siege, and there is nowhere to hide from Israel’s onslaught. Before this “war” Gaza was a form ...

[Amidst growing political polarization in Lebanon the term of President Michel Suleiman expired on 24 May with no successor in sight. Jadaliyya asked Co-Editor Maya Mikdashi to comment on the reasons for the vacuum, its ramifications and broader context]:
Jadaliyya (J): Why has a new Lebanese president not yet been selected?
Maya Mikdashi (MM): I think everybody believed that Michel Suleiman, the outgoing president, would accept an extra-constitutional extension of ...

Lebanon is slated to hold presidential elections next week, despite the fact that the parliamentary elections have yet to be held and it is the Lebanese parliament that elects the Lebanese President. Last year elections were postponed for the first time in the state’s history, and parliament illegitimately extended its own term in the absence of elections. This further throws into doubt the legitimacy of the looming presidential contest.
Thus far, several ...

In the past few months sex panics and moral panics, centered on gendered bodies and abuses, have rocked Lebanon. In this article I want to revisit three of these panics: photos of a semi-nude Lebanese Olympic Skier’s body and reactions to it; the impunity of wife murderers and wife abusers; and the razing of a Syrian makeshift refugee camp after (ultimately false) accusations of sex abuse by a camp resident of a mentally disabled Lebanese man. I bring these three cases ...

Lebanon is broken politically, economically, and socially. In addition to the violence that daily targets civilians for living in areas that are said to “belong” to this or that political faction, religious and sectarian hatred is on the rise, more and more people are pushed into poverty and unemployment, citizens, refugees, and migrant laborers alike freeze to death or are crushed to death on streets, in tents, and in unsound buildings. There is no (legitimate) Lebanese ...

On Thursday millions of families and friends and colleagues will gather together to celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States. Universities will be closed, and classes will be cancelled. Every year, this holiday weekend poses challenges to professors and students who are critical, and critically aware, of the fact that Thanksgiving is, foundationally speaking, a celebration of the ongoing genocide against native peoples and cultures in the United States.
As a newly-minted ...

While all Saudis live under a hyper capitalist, sectarian and brutal authoritarian regime, a Saudi cleric has issued a fatwa making it official that being a woman in Saudi Arabia sucks extra bad. This fatwa comes after some confusion surrounding the physiological effects of driving.
Last month a Saudi cleric issued a fatwa warning that driving effects the hips and pelvis of women, and thus their reproductive efficacy. After (some) men began worrying about the effects of ...

On Thursday my friend invited us over for a home cooked meal and a card game (tarnib), combining two of our favorite recreational activities. In preparation, she had gone to one of our favorite dessert stores known for their almond ice cream. Two hours later, a car laden with over sixty kilograms of TNT exploded on the street that she drove home on.
There are countless stories like these. They embody a macabre spin on “missed connections.” After all, the car bomb had a ...

I sat down today to write an article on proposed legal reforms to both the personal status and the electoral system in Lebanon. I have been meaning to write this article for over a month, and have it sketched out on paper, and half written it in my head. Its sentences haunted me while preparing for class and its arguments interrupted my thoughts, demanding to be written down.
But it is hard to see the utility of writing on the legal system, or on a feminist approach to both ...

The ongoing Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia in late 2010 have demonstrated that citizenship in the Arab Middle East is a subject in need of much critical scholarship and intervention. Many scholars, working from an archive of political philosophy that begins with Rousseau's social contract, have assessed the Arab national project of producing citizens skeptically, as Suad Joseph has demonstrated. Moreover, there is tendency in political theory to view members of ...

We must acknowledge, sit with, and address the sexual violence that has, is, and will occur in and around Tahrir Square. How do we do this work in a responsible and ethical manner that is in solidarity with Egypt's ongoing (and multiple) revolutions? How do we retain and respect political, economic, and social complexity in the face of the horrors of mass and public sexual assault?
How to write when all you want to do is shout?
Friday, 25 January 2013 was the second ...

There are over 170,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. These men, women, and children have come to Lebanon fleeing the ongoing and deteriorating violence in Syria. In addition, thousands of Palestinians have fled their refugee camps in Syria to brother camps in Lebanon. These people have no other place to go.
Since arriving in Lebanon, Syrian and Palestinian refugees (it is worth noting that Palestinian refugees in Syria and in Lebanon have suffered multiple removals and ...

My mother's mother tongue is not Arabic. This singular fact shaped much of my life and my education in Lebanon. When she moved to Beirut, she had two children, and then me in her belly. She met a student named Maya and thought the name sounded beautiful and strange. She has not lived in the country in which she was born - the country in which her family lives, celebrates holidays, and has grown older - for over three decades now. This fact terrifies me.
Prior to her moving ...

This week, Hurricane Sandy devastated large swaths of New York City's electrical grid, and almost a million city dwellers were left without power and/or water. With electricity gone and much of the city's infrastructure damaged, no internet or phone service was available. South of Thirty-fourth Street on the East and West sides, most stores were closed, and those that were open quickly ran out of supplies. People used their flashlights to scan the shelves of these stores, to ...

Bio

Maya Mikdashi received her PhD from Columbia University's Department of Anthropology. She is Co-Director of the documentary film About Baghdad. Maya is currently a Mellon Postdoctural Fellow at Rutgers University. She is Co-Founder/Editor ofJadaliyyaEzine.